1. Field of the Disclosure
Embodiments relate to managing vehicle driving control entity transitions of an autonomous vehicle based on an evaluation of performance criteria.
2. Description of the Related Art
An autonomous vehicle may be controlled by different vehicle driver control entities. The vehicle driver control entities supported by an autonomous vehicle generally include a human driver in a driver seat of the vehicle or a vehicle electronic control unit (ECU), but can also include remote entities such as a remote human (e.g., operating the autonomous vehicle as a drone over a network connection) or machine (e.g., a server functioning as a remote ECU over a network connection).
From time to time, autonomous vehicles need to implement transitions between vehicle driver control entities. For example, during operation in manual mode, a human driver may wish handoff control to the vehicle ECU (e.g., if the human driver suffers a medical emergency, wants to take a phone call or respond to a text message, wants to go to sleep, etc.), and initiate a user-initiated (or manual) handoff to the vehicle ECU. In another example, during operation in autonomous mode via the vehicle ECU, one or more sensors equipped on the vehicle that report sensor data to the vehicle may suffer performance degradation or may fail outright, which may trigger a machine-initiated handoff to the human driver.